Scientists Are Now 43 Seconds Closer to Producing Limitless Energy

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www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a654326…

YES! It's a click-bait title. Read the article to understand the breakthrough.

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Every minute that passes in Africa, scientists are 60 seconds closer to discovering infinite energy!

Almost certainly, the pop press is missing every possible "but". Just from what I do understand, how impressive this is depends on the temperature and density of that plasma and annoyingly, they actually do mention that, but then don't give the corresponding numbers.

I found a bunch of headlines saying the record for a tokamak is 22 minutes, which was impressive for beating the previous record by 25%. Progress in this tends to be incremental. Here's a nice little graph of energy*confinement time from The Future of Fusion Energy:

Thank you for the informative and thoughtful comment. I appreciate it.

Hey, no problem!

This isn't to say that the research isn't great, either. I don't think they'd bother if it was useless. And per the diagram they've had to do more and more with less funding since 2000.

I'm already getting limitless energy from fusion. I just use PV as a mediator.

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I'm still hopeful for the triton stuff. The idea of harnessing the em from pulses of fusion is very clever.... The engineering problems are extreme, but if they can make it work it'd be something special

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why 43 seconds, you say..

"Fusion reactions were sustained at high performance levels for 43 seconds, which is a major breakthrough in plasma physics."

https://newatlas.com/energy/france-tokamak-cea-west-fusion-reactor-record-plasma-duration/

hasn't it already been done for longer?

edit: Okay it's a different kind of reactor, that makes sense.

Surely ITER is our best bet at this point amongst the current reactor plans?

I wonder who will win this nuclear fusion race: the United States, Europe, or China?